Archives for June 2011

Yesterday was one of the most enjoyable – and surreal – days I can remember.
Certainly it’s the first time I’ve ever dressed up in a reflective silver toga and gazed meaningfully into the depths of a mirrorball whilst trapped inside a giant plastic bubble pumped full of oxygen…

I’ll come to exactly how this happened soon, but for the time being let’s rewind.

We’re not going to talk at you and expect you to sit there and just listen. We want to talk with you. We want to hear your ideas. And we’re not just going to retread the same old territory. It’ll be fresh, intelligent, interesting and challenging.

I have a Google alert set up to find people talking about the loudness war. Every so often it turns up a blog post that’s worth tweeting, sometimes it turns up a forum discussion that’s worth contributing to.

But more often than not it turns up things that frustrate me. The top contenders are: people trying to justify the bad sound of their favourite act’s last CD by saying it sounds better in the car/iPod earbuds/wherever; people claiming that we actually prefer the sound of crushed, limited dynamic range music (research says we don’t) or the classic “you can only hear how great ‘Death Magnetic’ sounds on really good equipment” (!)

What frustrates me most though, is people using numbers and waveforms to try and “prove” that something sounds bad, when it doesn’t. You can’t tell if something sounds bad by looking at it, or measuring it, you have to listen to it.

And before I go any further – of course I’m aware of the irony of me saying that.

If the gain reduction meter doesn’t return to zero several times a bar, you’re almost certainly using too much compression

And I stand by that suggestion – most of the time.

Now, just yesterday my good friend Joe Gilder over at Home Studio Corner put up a post on this subject, and quoted my rule of thumb. And immediately, the Devil’s Advocate in me wanted to post a reply. It got so long, I changed it into this post – I think I see a trend developing !

So, this post is about the times when you might want to ignore that rule – after all, rules are made to be broken, especially rules-of-thumb : )

The exception to the rule

When might you want to have compression constantly happening ?

When it sounds great.

OK, I know – when is that ? The answer often involves a parameter in compression that people don’t talk about much – the knee.

Some people, including me, have replied “any, they’re all the same”, but several more very experienced, respected and successful engineers have commented there that they never use data-compression on their audio files, because they think it can affect the sound.

Now when it comes from people you respect, this is a fascinating claim, because the there is no theoretical way that this can be true, unless there is a fault with the playback system, or the testing method.

Because lossless data-compression has to be that – lossless – or it’s broken, by definition. And, if two files are data-identical, they are effectively the same file. So they must sound indistinguishable – again, by definition. If they don’t, then there is a fault or design flaw with the replay system.

Thats the theory, at least. And in my experience, the theory holds up. Here’s an example: